Heart of Atlantis

Chapter 27

Somewhere inside a demonic dimension

Quinn cautiously moved behind Ptolemy, considering him the lesser of many, many evils, as she watched his “brothers” caper and tumble around on the ancient mosaic tile. Its beauty compared to their hideousness created a sickening juxtaposition that her brain kept trying to reject. Apparently the mind shut down when reality took such a horrible left turn. Her stomach also contributed to her general misery, since it roiled at each new assault to the senses.

Ptolemy’s family wasn’t just a visual tragedy.

Oh, no.

They stank, too. They reeked with a stench like rotting sewage and sulfuric acid, which led her to wonder anew if she really had landed in her dimension’s version of hell. It certainly smelled bad enough.

She finally ventured a question, when Ptolemy and his brothers ended a conversation that had consisted of squeaks, grunts, and shrill whistling noises. “What do they want?”

“They want you,” he said, sounding amused. “They don’t have mates, either.”

“Oh, hell no,” she blurted out.

He turned to her and smiled that hideous smile full of teeth. “Possibly they only want to eat you, though. Suddenly I look better to you?”

She wanted to disagree, but in comparison to this bunch, he was at least mostly human-looking. She’d be damned if she’d be signing up for either option, though.

The din built up to a dull roar again, and Ptolemy turned to give his family his full attention. Probably safest. Quinn watched with growing interest as he drew a familiar small wooden box out of his pocket. She didn’t know what he’d done with the scepter.

“I have retrieved the crown jewel of Atlantis!” He withdrew the tourmaline, placed the box on a ledge, and flourished the gem about. The chattering and squeaks rose to a nearly unbearable level, and then a hush fell on the room as Ptolemy prepared to do . . . nothing.

He waved Poseidon’s Pride about in a high arc over his head, and absolutely nothing at all happened.

“Maybe it doesn’t work here?” Quinn held out her hand. “Want me to take a look?”

“It’s not a faulty handgun, you moron,” Ptolemy snarled at her. “What possible use would you, a mere non-magical human, be?”

She held up her hands, palms out, in surrender. She didn’t have any desire to be his next victim. “Hey, I was just offering to help. Shutting up now.”

One of the bolder brothers—cousins? uncles? Quinn had no idea and didn’t really want to think about it—started to lurch closer, chittering loudly, until Ptolemy leapt forward and smashed it in the face with one clawed hand. Sensing weakness, the others swarmed the fallen one and tore it to shreds before moving back and giving Ptolemy and Quinn a little space.

She’d been in enough battles to realize that the temporary retreat wouldn’t last. This was pretty clearly an “eat what you kill” kind of society, cousin or not, and she was starting to worry that she would be the one who got eaten. Or worse. Her mind stuttered away from the alternatives.

“It must be useless in my dimension,” Ptolemy finally said, and Quinn rolled her eyes.

“Gee, I wish I’d thought of that.” She sniped, and Ptolemy casually backhanded her so hard she flew backward and cracked her head against the wall before falling in a heap to the floor.

Maybe there really was a time to quit being a smart-ass, and captive in a demonic dimension was a good place to start. Her skull rang with pretty little bells for a few long minutes, as she blinked and tried to focus. She was fairly sure he’d torn open her lip, too, but she didn’t care enough to take her hands away from her poor, aching head, until she noticed one of the smaller atrocities staring at her like she was catnip and he was a very hungry kitten. Then she started to worry. More.

“Wipe your face,” Ptolemy said, throwing a piece of cloth at her. She looked at it and realized he’d torn it from his shirt.

“Human blood is a delicacy to them,” he said nonchalantly, but she noticed his gaze was fixed a little bit too intently on her chin.

“Only to them?” She wiped the blood away and then rolled up the cloth and threw it as far as she could from where she still sat on the floor. Several of the creatures hurled themselves into a biting, snapping frenzy over the cloth, which she didn’t find reassuring in the least.

“If I can’t get this to work, we might have to run for it,” Ptolemy said, continuing the hit parade of not reassuring. He shoved the gem into his jacket pocket and scowled as he scanned the room.

“Can’t you just call your portal and get us out of here?”

“Not without taking some of them with me. Do you think your world is ready for them?”

She looked around at the mass of monsters inching bit by bit closer, many of them actively drooling long, glistening ropes of slime as they watched her with, generally, more than two eyes each.

“No, my world is definitely not ready for them,” she agreed. She put a hand on her knife hilt and prepared to kill as many of them as she could before they killed her.

She just hoped Alaric found a way to be happy, one day. The thought of Alaric reminded her of the shell he’d given her and bolstered her courage, in spite of the pain still ringing in her skull, and she climbed to her feet, the better to fight off the atrocities.

“I’m not asking this to be a smart-ass, but why did we come here again?”

“I wanted you to see why I must escape this place, so you would better understand me when we are mated,” he said sadly. “Instead, I have caused you to become even more horrified by me.”

For one brief moment, she almost felt sorry for him. She thought she’d had sibling rivalry problems, when she and Riley hit puberty together, and there were two emotional empaths in the same house. At least neither of them had tried to kill and eat the other one’s boyfriend.

Of course, neither she nor her sister was a murderous kidnapper who wanted to take over somebody else’s world, either.

She squared her shoulders and tried to put a tiny bit of empathy in her voice as she forced herself to lean forward and hug him. “I actually do kind of understand, and I’m sorry for what you’ve endured, but kidnapping me and forcing me to have your kids, plus conquering my world, isn’t the way to my heart.”

He looked surprised, and then he laughed. “I don’t care about your heart. It’s another organ entirely that I need.”

Leering, he patted her stomach, and any shred of sympathy she’d had for his plight vanished in the wave of revulsion that punched her in the gut as hard as he’d punched her in the face.

“For now, though, you have to go,” he said as, at some unknown signal, his family started to swarm the spot where they stood. “I’ll hold them off and then make it back to you later. You’ll be safe enough.”

He picked Quinn up and threw her at the wall as hard as he could, over the gaping, shark-toothed maws and grasping, claw-handed reach of the atrocities who were leaping for her. She braced for impact and wondered if she could survive a shattered skull, but the wall dissolved into the garish orange light of his portal, and she fell through it. The last thing she saw of his dimension was one of his relatives stabbing its swordlike appendage into Ptolemy’s back so hard that the tip of it came out the front of his chest, exactly where his heart would have been if he’d been human.

Ptolemy opened his mouth to scream, and a blackish-green oily liquid gushed out. Surely that had killed him. Surely. In spite of the nausea-making vortex, she smiled fiercely—both with triumph and because she had a wonderful secret. Those creatures were trapped on their side of the vortex; none of them seemed to be smart enough to figure out the portal.

And, even better, Quinn’s past had come to her rescue. One of her mentors in her early days of rebel training had been a champion pickpocket. Quinn had forced herself to embrace Ptolemy for a very, very good reason. She put her hand inside the front waistband of her borrowed pants and double-checked that the leather pouch she’d borrowed from Lauren’s things was still secure.

And that Poseidon’s Pride was secure inside it.

She’d known she was quite likely to die from daring to touch the gem, but she’d had to try, and apparently Alaric’s magic, which he’d shared with her, was powerful enough to protect her. Or else it was gearing up to incinerate her, but she was frankly too tired to care which, especially if this never-ending trip through the demon portal didn’t end soon.

As if on command, it dumped her—out of the portal and into the frying pan, so to speak—and she landed in the same hotel room where Ptolemy had held her hostage before. The windows Alaric had blown out were in the process of being replaced, and seven thugs pointed seven guns at her.

She raised her hands in surrender and sank slowly into a velvet chair. “Hey, as long as I’m here, can we order room service again? I’m kind of hungry.”

“You don’t get food, bitch,” one of the uglier ones said. These were all humans, though, so ugly was relative compared to what she’d seen back in Ptolemy’s homeworld.

Ha. Ugly was relative compared to his relatives. She’d made another funny. Either that or relief was making her giddy. She laughed out loud.

Big, bad, and comparatively ugly raised his hand, as if to hit her, and suddenly the other six guns were trained on him.

“Ptolemy said not to touch her. Not to lay a single finger on her in any way, or he disembowels all of us,” a very serious-looking man dressed in all black said firmly. “I like my intestines where they are.”

“She laughed at me,” the first one complained, and the man in black shot him in the head.

Quinn quit laughing, fast.

Brain spatters on your clothes tended to do that to a person.

She lost the battle, after all. She leaned over and threw up all over one of the thugs’ shoes. Then she sat there, huddled into a ball in the chair, with her eyes shut tightly as she tried to contact Alaric. She could still feel him through the soul-meld link, and even more strongly than when she’d been in the same room with him, which made her wonder if her own terror or the presence of the tourmaline was causing that.

She didn’t care which it was, ultimately, so long as it worked.

After a little while, she decided to conserve her energy for another try later. She opened her eyes and looked for the man in black. The brain shooter.

“I need to go to the bathroom, please,” she said politely.

He nodded, and she walked straight to the bathroom, closed the door, and cleaned up the best she could. She washed the blood and brains off her face and hands and clothes and realized that very few people could say that about themselves, that they’d washed brains off their clothes.

Then she realized that her racing thoughts, breathing, and heart rate meant that she was slipping into a state of shock, which made sense, given the events of the past several days. She had to sit down on the edge of the tub, put her head between her knees, and take deep breaths.

A knock sounded at the door, and it opened before she could answer.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” It was the man in black again. He must be in charge.

She raised her head and considered him for a moment. “Would you be?”

Something shifted in his icy blue gaze, but he simply nodded. “Fair enough.”

He retreated and closed the door, and she sat alone in the bathroom, on the cold edge of the tub, for a very long time. When she thought she had the strength to try to call Alaric again, she powered up and fired out the loudest mental blast she could manage.

Alaric, I need you right now.

This time, he answered.

I’m on my way.

Quinn smiled again, doing little more than baring her teeth. The guy with his brains on the floor might be the lucky one of the bunch.